


i'm gonna be the man who's growing old with you

by Welcoming_Disaster



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Bittersweet Ending, Both Bucky and Bruce are kind of in this, F/M, Funerals, Kid Fic, Pie, Steve Rogers Comes Home From the War, but not enough so that I felt like I could tag for them, m rating is really very mild
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-11
Updated: 2019-04-11
Packaged: 2020-01-11 08:35:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18426924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Welcoming_Disaster/pseuds/Welcoming_Disaster
Summary: Steve Rogers marries Peggy Carter on a sunny day in 1946. Wanting to be out of the spotlight, he takes her last name.





	i'm gonna be the man who's growing old with you

**Author's Note:**

> So this started as a short headcanon about what Steve would do if he married Peggy after the war. It didn't end like that.

Steve Rogers marries Peggy Carter on a sunny day in 1946. He’d always imagined Bucky would be his best man, when he dared to imagine himself married, but Bucky’s gone, now, so he hands it off to the rest of the Commandos and lets them fight for it. He knows Howard’s disappointed, but the bachelor party that Dugan throws is better than any kind of expensive affair that Stark would put together. 

 

Steve Rogers marries Peggy Carter in 1946, but they end up tangled together on a couch earlier than that, when Steve can still feel the bite of icy water on his skin and, when his muscles still ache with exhaustion, and he thinks,  _ that was so close,  _ and,  _ no, I always would have made it back to her.  _

 

He’s on top of her and inside of her, big and warm and gentle, and she glances up at him through dark eyelashes and asks, “Are you planning on moving, or…?”

  
“We’ve got time,” he says, and he presses his lips under her chin, open, gentle, and it’s not quite a kiss because kisses are supposed to end and he just  _ stays _ , keeps talking into it _.  _ “We’ve got all the time in the world.”

 

He’s twenty-seven and she’s twenty-four and they lived, they survived the war, survived all of it, and they’re going to have forever. 

 

And afterwards the couch is too small, so she’s halfway on top of him because neither of them feels like getting up, and he says, “Suppose I’ve got to make an honest woman out of you, now.” 

 

And Peggy says, “Think about my line of work, Steve. I’ve strayed from that label quite some time ago,” but then she must see the way his face crumbles at the perceived rejection because she adds, “though I suppose I just might let you.” 

 

They take their time with it, after that. 

 

Wanting to be out of the spotlight, he takes her last name. 

 

He goes back to art school. She works. Several people, including Howard Stark, try to re-create Project Rebirth. Some of the results are disastrous, as disastrous as the Hulk and the Red Skull and maybe even worse. Steve grits his teeth and goes in for blood tests because he's a lot of things but he isn't a hypocrite. 

 

The SSR is disbanded and SHIELD begins to form. “Do you want in?” Asks Howard, and Steve shakes his head no, talks about the still life he’s working on until Howard goes away.

 

“We could use you,” says Phillips, and Steve rinses soap suds of a plate and talks about planting a garden, talks about Bucky, talks about anything else. Phillips watches him and his eyes are either too understanding or not understanding enough. 

 

By 1950, the US has super soldiers and S. Carter has several pieces in galleries. Howard’s money, his bidding for the art, has something to do with it, but Steve tells himself it doesn’t matter. They're haunting, reminiscent of the post-WW1 lost generation paintings. He finds great in painting them, sometimes, and sometimes he feels like a fraud recycling the same old colors to say he’s sad. 

 

In 1951, their first child is born. They name her Sarah. Peggy's awful busy with the new organization she's a part of, so Steve stays home with her. He can’t paint, worried about something happening in the time it takes him to wash his hands and pick her up, worried about the fumes. He writes a book. 

 

He packs lunches for Peggy. She's pulling long days at work, now, more and more. He learns to cook from his mother’s old book of recipes, which Becca Barnes had held on to for him during the war. He has Becca over, too, Becca and her son, only a few years older than Sarah. Her husband’s gone, now, too. 

 

He introduces Peggy to Thanksgiving, and they invite the Commandos, and the Barnes clan, and agents Peggy knows from work, and Steve bakes pie after pie while Peggy puts on an unused apron she’d gotten as a wedding gift, embroidered with flowers, and makes three different kinds of soups. 

 

“As soon as Jim comes home,” Says Ellen, Morita’s wife, at the dinner table, “He’s all the kids wanna see. It’s like I stop existing.”   
  


“Sarah’s the same way, with Pegs,” Steve says, and for a moment there’s an awkward silence. Leah Barnes looks at Peggy like she’s personally offended by the kind of mother that she is. Steve looks at Peggy, and Peggy looks at Steve, and both realize that they don’t care at the exact same time.

 

Sarah gets older. She’s sharp, sharper than any kid Steve’s ever known. She’s good at puzzle games, solving them faster than her fat, small fingers can keep up with. She learns words at the speed of light and doesn’t forget them -- Peggy jokes they ought to be replacing her bedtime stories with a dictionary. 

 

When she’s four, she helps Steve paint their mailbox, neat letters spelling out C-A-R-T-E-R, she points out a color that Steve thought no one else could see. He remembers what he’d heard about the serum being genetic, rewriting every part of him.

 

When Sarah starts kindergarten, Peggy asks Steve he'd like to get back into it -- they need people like him, she says. 

 

Steve thinks of Bucky's face as he fell and he says, “I'm done, Pegs,” and he means it. He says, “I worry about you enough as it is.”

 

They have Michael James the summer after that, in 1956. Peggy takes time off work, this time around, but not much -- she's back after three months. Steve writes another book. It’s about a spy named after president Buchanan, or -- or, perhaps, someone else. 

 

On a summer night, he lies awake with his arm around Peggy’s waist. She’s not asleep. He can feel it in how she’s breathing. He always get Mike in the night, because he runs on a few hours of sleep a lot more easily, but his crying wakes her up, too. Michael cries a lot.

 

“Can I tell you something?” he whispers. 

 

She flips over on her side to face him, warm and sleepy. “Mm?” 

 

“Bucky n’ me, we were…” he falters. She reaches up, threads his fingers in her hair. 

 

“I know,” she says, “I saw you.” 

 

It throws him for a loop. Whatever he expected, he didn’t expect this. When he’s silent, she keeps talking. 

 

“I’ll admit,” she says, “It took me a little while. I thought I ought to keep my distance, but I just couldn’t stay away. I was worried you wouldn’t…” 

 

“Oh, no, Pegs,” he says, “I love you, alright? I love you so much.”    
  
“If you could have him here, instead,” she doesn’t need to finish the question. He interrupts.

 

“I wouldn’t trade you for anything in the world, Pegs,” he says, “not for Marilyn Monroe or Bucky Barnes or Roosevelt himself, back from the grave. I wouldn’t trade ya for a million bucks or world peace.”

 

She says, “that’s what I thought,” but she still sounds relieved as she’s saying it. And he’s about to keep talking, to say it again, Sarah throws open the door and declares she had a nightmare about a monster that ate Dugan and that she’s spending the night in their bed now, thanks. And then Michael starts crying and Steve groans as he peels himself out of bed, but this is his life, now, and he wouldn’t trade it for Marilyn Monroe or world peace, either. 

 

People talk about them a lot. There's articles in the press ("Captain America -- Whipped!" and "Don't let dames do this to you!") and the neighborhood old women don't seem to trust Steve with the kids even after he's spent six years as the stay at home spouse. Howard drops by, makes smug comments about it, and envies the white picket fence aspect of it all. It's dampened somewhat when Peggy's gone for two weeks and Steve shrugs his shoulders and says it's probably something important. 

 

They swear off children after that because two is a nightmare. Steve goes for a vasectomy in 1957. 

 

That same year Steve’s the best man at Howard's wedding, and it’s not a good time for him -- Howard insists on introducing him as Steve Rogers and takes several pictures of him holding Stark products. They leave Mike with the sitter, since he isn’t even quite a year old yet, but Sarah comes with. Peggy does her hair in thick, pretty curls, and she wears a long flowy blue dress like Cinderella did in the movie. 

 

The shield, which Steve had laid down in 1945, somehow makes an appearance, too. He trades looks with Peggy, hoping to perhaps get going soon, but Sarah’s eyes sparkle and she’s pulling him over by the hand, eyes wide, and Steve’s always been awful at saying no to her. 

 

She hoists it high over her head, small hands braced on the inner straps, and Howard laughs and pulls it away, “That’s not a toy for girls, sweetheart,” he says, “why don’t we give this back to dear old dad?” 

 

Steve sees red. They have a talk. Were it not Howard’s wedding day, perhaps they’d have more than a talk. 

 

Still, they part on good terms, Howard clapping him hard on back in a hug. 

 

One Saturday morning, July 1960, Pegs wakes him at five thirty in the morning and says, in a too-casual tone of voice, that the kids aren’t likely to be awake for another thirty minutes are least. Steve grins, running a big hand over her hip bone, and--

 

\-- and they’re all out of condoms. He shakes the box at her. She makes a face and then goes, anyways, for the waistband of his pajama pants. 

 

“Pegs,” he says, lifting an eyebrow. “You could just come up here and I’ll use my m--”

 

“I want it all,” she tells him, and it seems real reasonable at the time -- she’s almost forty, after all, and nothing of his should be working. 

 

Neither of them really think about the serum in the context of the surgery until several months later. Peggy whines about getting too old for it (the first time, Steve later remembers, that she’s said she’s too old for anything) and Steve clears out his studio and paints clouds on the ceiling. 

 

They call the new arrival Rebecca  _ Margaret,  _ at Steve’s insistence.

 

Steve's less delicate about them, by then -- he paints just fine and doesn't have a heart attack every time they cry. Michael’s running around as soon as he can walk, and even Steve has a hard time keeping up with him with Becks balanced in the crook of his arm. Sarah rolls her eyes at them from where she’s neatly filling her notebooks with equations and notes and mutters something under her breath he pretends not to hear. The mouth on that kid is unbelievable and definitely not his fault.

 

One night in 1968, Steve gets a call from Peggy’s work. It’s not exactly unusual (there were a few times, which he delicately didn’t mention to her, when people insisted on asking for his permission before sending her out on missions), but it hasn’t happened in while. He’s worried right off the bat, and when the voice on the other side of the line informs him there’s been an incident, he only just barely keeps himself calm long enough to ask for the address, scrawls a note to hang on the fridge (‘Had to dash, don’t worry about it, eat casserole in fridge, love, Dad’). 

 

When he gets there, Peggy’s got a broken nose and bruised ribs and bloody hands and fight in her eyes. She can’t tell him what happened, because it’s classified, and even as he’s driving her back he’s made up his mind. 

 

“I’m getting back into it,” he says, later, after all the excitement has died down and Mike and Becks are in bed (Sarah’s seventeen, then, and they’ve more or less given up telling her to sleep). He’s cleaning gunk out from a long cut on her forehead with a wet paper towel. “Maybe part-time.” 

 

She says, “you sure?” 

 

And he says, “Yeah.” and that’s that. He figures she’s always known he’d end up back in it, one way or another. 

 

Becks grows up the quickest, it feels like, and out of all of them, Steve thinks he sees the most of Peggy in her. One moment she’s four years old he’s dancing with her on top of his feet (“I wanna lead,” she insists), and the next she’s eight her hair is too short and she’s finding every excuse to skip church on Sundays, she’s trying to get Steve to say her name is Billy so she can join the Boy Scouts, she’s-- 

 

She’s a riot. Steve takes her on long rides on his motorbike and she screeches with laughter the whole time. She keeps pet mice, which Mike is inexplicably terrified of, in a cage in her room, in Steve’s old studio. 

 

Anthony Stark is born when Becks is almost ten years old. Even after what happened at the wedding, even after years of visits that don’t quite go right, they're the godparents. Of course they're the godparents. 

 

"Can I hold him?" Becks asks, and Michael starts talking about how he held her like that, and she sticks her tongue out and insists that he's only four years older, he wouldn't have, and he says four and a half, and Howard tells everyone to please stop making so much noise, he's got enough going on as it. And that's when Steve starts fretting something awful, because if Howard can't handle his polite fourteen-year-old, how's he gonna be a good dad for a baby? 

 

He keeps fretting all through the weekend they're there, right after the birth. Howard has them coming down, though Maria obviously doesn’t want visitors, tired and looking to be alone after the difficult labor. Steve takes the baby to give her a break, and he sings to him, bouncing him up and down on his hip, until Howard asks him what the hell kind of man acts like that. And Steve would let it go, but Mike's in the room, and Steve's not letting anyone tell his son what he can and can't act like, so he says something, alright. 

 

And that's probably the beginning of the end, with Howard.

 

It's almost about the time he starts noticing that Peggy's slowing down and he isn't. She's 49, now. He's 52. She's full of energy, sure, she's getting a lot of good work down, but she complains of aches and pains he doesn't feel. He rubs her feet and her back and tell her that she could retire, y'know, that they'd be alright, and she tells him there's still work to be done and he respects more than he's ever respected anyone, loves her more than he's ever loved anyone before, and he holds his family close even as the kids get older and start wriggling out of his kisses, even as Sarah and then Michael go off to college, to trade school. When she’s fourteen, Becks starts spelling her name with an “x” instead of a “cks,” and that beats Steve, honestly, but he’s stopped trying to understand what the kids think is cool years ago. 

 

Peggy starts getting mistaken for his mother. She's not insecure about it -- she knows, he thinks, that she's the one for him, not matter what, but it still weighs on her. Her scoops her up in his arms and he buries his unwrinkled face in her greying hair.

 

Sarah doesn't seem to age much past twenty and she runs marathons in medical school and lifts men twice her size, easily, and that gives Steve hope he won't outlive his kids, but every moment with Peggy is a moment to be treasured, now.

 

Sarah gets married in 1979. She’s 28, fresh out of medical school. Her husband, Paul, is a veterinarian. She keeps her last name -- it’s a good one. Uncle Howard, of course, is invited, and so is baby Tony, now nine. 

 

Bex wears a suit to the wedding which matches with Steve’s, a beautiful navy blue. She’s headed into the Airforce. It’s only been three years that women have been allowed to that for, and Steve’s so proud. 

 

At the wedding, Tony Stark looks Steve in the eyes and tells him that that's not for girls. And Steve could hit something, for just a moment, because he knows where he got that from, and he says, "Did your dad tell you that?" 

 

"Dad says you're a fag, too," Tony says, which makes sense -- Howard hasn't liked him in years, now, puts up with him because he's Captain America. 

 

Steve thinks about pointing out that he's married to a woman and remembers the nights he'd spent with Bucky, god rest his soul, before the war, thinks about Stonewall, a year before Tony's birth, about civil rights, and instead he says, "Ain't nothing wrong with that either, son." 

 

And that year they have Tony over for Thanksgiving, because his parents are out of town again. Steve's 61 and Peggy's 58 and she's recently director of SHIELD while he's a field agent, he's STRIKE, he's stubbornly refusing promotions and he still doesn't have a single grey hair, doesn't have any wrinkles. 

 

They’ve got a few of Peggy’s friends from work over, too, SHIELD agents, and representatives from Becca’s side of the Barnes clan. Twenty-two year old Mike’s brought his new girl, Emily, around, which means it’s probably serious. 

 

Steve does another thing Howard says men aren't supposed to do when he cooks, rows and rows of perfect pies, potatoes, that ethnic recipe he picked up god knows where. Tony's an asshole, already, but it's easy to push past that and find a boy, intensely bright and longing for validation. Steve doesn't see him much, but he does his best whenever he can, and now he teaches him to make the kind of pecan pie that would anyone proud.

 

Peggy becomes director of SHIELD in 1982. She's 61 and he's 64. Their first grandchildren, Sarah’s twin boys, have just turned one. He dyes her hair, not because she needs help but because he wants to, because he touches her every chance he gets. 

 

"I'm sorry I'm not home more often," she says, "I'm not going to be home more often." And he tells her he wouldn't trade her for anything, like he always does -- he tells her he loves her and he means it with every fiber of his soul, he tells she's given him everything he could ever ask for, if he's an honest man. She's 61 and he's 64 and they make love on the couch that day like they did when they'd just come home from the war, like they did before they had kids. And afterwards she looks him in the eyes and she tells him to stop living for her.

 

He quits his job at SHIELD the next day. He doesn't see her there, anyways, doesn't feel any sense of fulfillment from it. He watches coverage of protests and he runs for local government (if he like things easy, he’d run as Steve Rogers -- he doesn’t). He's mayor at 68 and senator at 75 and he's 82 when runs for president. 

 

"Don't vote for me because I'm Captain America," he says, and people do anyways. 

 

Bex, 38, the second captain in the family now, visits him at work. She doesn't look a day over 25. No one stares -- super soldiers are rare, but everyone knows it's genetic now. Steve gets his first grey hair at 86, during his second term in office.

 

Peggy retires when he's 87 and she's 84. First lady and Director of SHIELD is a lot, at her age, but it's sudden, anyways, because it's two days after Michael's killed. It's a motorcycle accident. His wife, Abigail, clutches Steve's third grandchild, eleven-year-old Emily, to her chest at the funeral. Steve holds Peggy and feels her back hitch with uneven, hysterical sobs. He mumbles ' _ I love you _ 's and ' _ oh god _ 's into her hair, and then he looks her in the eyes and he says he wouldn't trade this for anything, wouldn't trade her for anything, wouldn't trade Mike for anything. 

 

She retires the day they get the news. She still has a week left, though, to train the new guy, and wrap things up. Two days before she's due to come home for keeps, she calls him and she says it might be longer than that. She says she's found something, she says she's worried. 

 

"Am I cleared for this?" he asks. 

 

"Not even you," she replies. 

 

"Fury? Coulson?" a million names come to his head, at once -- over time, the Carter family's Thanksgiving has come to include almost more SHIELD agents than relatives, "..Hell, Romanova? Barton?"

 

"Yes," she says, "I do know. I'll see you soon, sweetheart."

 

"I love you," he says, “drive home safe.”

 

“I love you too,” she says, and then, after she hangs up the phone: "Hydra's supposed to be gone.”  Jasper Sitwell stares at her through the glass door of her office.

 

She drives home safe, but she doesn’t get to her meeting with Fury the next morning. It’s a car accident. Nearby, a young woman sees a man with a metal arm, only twenty minutes later. She gets into a car accident, too.

 

At the funeral, Steve gives the eulogy. “She was everything,” he says, plain and honest, “I wouldn’t have traded her for anything, not for as long as she’d have me.” 

 

He keeps talking, doesn’t know how long he talks for, every word of it firm and genuine and strong. He doesn’t break down until the end, and then suddenly he’s crying, stray tears, and then full on sobs, and he’s stepping back from the podium. Bex rushes out towards him, from one of the seats in the front, wraps her arms around his shoulders.

“Daddy,” she says, “Dad.” 

 

He pulls her close and buries his face in her hair, and she just  _ hangs  _ off of him, boneless, so he scoops her into his arm, “Sweetheart, think you’re getting a lil too big for this,” he says, even as he carries her down the steps. The crowd laughs -- he’s still mic’d. He wasn’t thinking about it.

  
Sarah stands up to meet them. 

 

He holds his girls close to him. He’s 87 and president and Mr. Margaret Carter and a widower and so  _ so  _ lost and he has smile lines, now, but he’s not using them. Sarah is 55 and she’s Dr. Carter and her twin sons are in the back row, watching him with wide eyes. Bex is 44 and, Jesus, she’s still his baby but she’s Dr. Carter, too, now, and she’s got two dogs and he feels guilty he hasn’t met one of them, yet, too busy with work.

 

For a moment, they feel like all he has, but then he catches Abigail and Em in the back, once again, and Tony Stark, still a kid in all the ways that count and too smart for his own good, and Coulson, Fury, Barton and Romanova. She was everything, he thinks, and they’re everything too. 

 

And then before he knows it, it’s 2012 and he’s been living without Peggy for seven years and he’s never going to be OK but he doesn’t have to be. He dons his Captain America uniform for the first time in decades for the alien invasion.

 

He looks over at the Iron Man suit and he teases Tony Stark for the obvious fancy he’s got for Bruce Banner (a consultant, now, and nothing more), and Tony’s voice gets all high pitched as he protests that he’s not a child, Steve, that he’s lost the right to tease him about crushes. 

 

He’s going to do OK, from now on. 

**Author's Note:**

> And then Steve probably goes on to be the Avengers' fucking grandma and also Civil War doesn't happen okay thnx bye
> 
> (if you liked it, keep in mind i will sell my firstborn for kudos and comments)
> 
> s/o to bri for helping me write peggy! ily bri


End file.
